On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.
The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.
Ignoring Administration's Harm to Science
The report completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel).
Vague Solutions to Real Problems
One of the real problems it discusses is the amount of time researchers need to spend on writing grants and performing administrative tasks, taking away from their time doing research. SNGA promises to relieve this by simplifying regulations and streamlining the grant application process. But it’s also remarkably vague, in that its authors do not identify a single regulation that is in need of reform.
Lack of Self-Awareness
The report also seems not to realize that it is being written by the Trump administration. One of the reasons researchers have spent so much time writing grants is a general uncertainty about funding, and that’s something that the administration has dramatically increased through the haphazard termination of existing grants, by proposing massive budget cuts for science agencies, and by slowing the release of funds that had been allocated to researchers by Congress.
Innovation and Peer Review
Another area of concern in the SNGA is that of innovation, both within science and in the translation of scientific findings to commercialization. The former has been recognized as a potential issue by the scientific community, as some measures indicate that more of the research we’re doing in recent decades is incremental, and there are fewer large advances.
Conclusion
The White House report on a new golden age of science seems to lack a perspective that’s internally coherent, or consistent with the other goals and actions of the Trump administration. While it highlights some real problems within the scientific community, its proposed solutions seem vague and unrealistic.
Source: Original article